Mr. Lodge's account of this critical February period shows
ignorance not only of the letter of February 24, but of the real
situation. He relies upon von Holst instead of the documents,
then misquotes him on a point of essential chronology, and from
unwarranted assumptions and erroneous and incomplete data draws
unreliable conclusions. Before this letter of February 24 and the
new cumulative evidence of the crisis, there falls to the ground
the sneer in Mr. Lodge's question, "if [Webster's] anxiety was
solely of a public nature, why did it date from March 7 when,
prior to that time, there was much greater cause for alarm than
afterwards?" Webster was anxious before the 7th of March, as so
many others were, North and South, and his extreme anxiety
appears in the letter of February 24, as well as in repeated
later utterances. No one can read through the letters of Webster
without recognizing that he had a genuine anxiety for the safety
of the Union; and that neither in his letters nor elsewhere is
there evidence that in his conscience he was "ill at ease" or
"his mind not at peace". Here as elsewhere, Mr. Lodge's
biography, written over forty years ago, reproduces anti-slavery
bitterness and ignorance of facts (pardonable in 1850) and
seriously misrepresents Webster's character and the situation in
that year.[63]

[63] Lodge's reproduction of Parton, pp. 16-17, 98, 195, 325-326,
349, 353, 356, 360. Other errors in Lodge's Webster, pp. 45, 314,
322, 328, 329-330, 352.


By the last week in February and the first in March, the peak of